OVERVIEW:
Despite warnings, many people do not prepare for severe weather threats. People are often forced to evacuate at the last minute and suffer from devastating property and personal losses.
Weatherlist aims to arm people for weather threats with a system of products designed to help people in hurricane prone areas prepare for, persevere through and recover from dramatic weather events. It is a combination of a connected in-home device that displays the weather and alert users to approaching weather events and an app that provides checklists, guides, and document storage.
For 8 months I led our team's strategy and research, to shape this product with the goal of building greater risk awareness in flood prone communities.
SKILLS: Product Management, Design Strategy, Research, User Interaction, UX Design
COLLABORATORS: Kevin Martin, Mike Lytle, Zi Liang Xu
PROCESS
Research was the core of this project from start to finish. Check out a diagram of our research journey here.
OUR HOUSTON RESEARCH JOURNEY
click for full research video
A trigger is useless unless it is accompanied by clear action
Weatherlist's system of products provides people with an alert accompanied by preparation checklists that are personalized to the household's needs, appropriate to the weather risk, and vetted by national weather organizations. These checklists eliminate much of the guesswork and planning of extreme weather prep.
Every-Day Interaction builds a relationship
In the day-to-day, Weatherlist provides basic, glanceable weather information that assists the homeowner in making daily weather related decisions, building trust in the product.
when needed, Weatherlist becomes a strong trigger to action
As a weather threat approaches, the daily information changes to show the most pertinent alerts about the weather threat. A front ring illuminates, counting down the hours before the incoming weather threat while a pulsing back light gives further cue to the imminent danger
an accompanying app simplifies the decision making process
Weatherlists' digital component creates a personalized prep plan that is modulated by local forecasts, eliminating decision fatigue and creating a plan that can be completed collaboratively by a household
Prepare, Recover and Persevere with Weatherlist
IMPACT
Weatherlist’s impact is three-fold:
changing a household’s daily response to and relationship with weather
community level: enabling collaboration between neighbors to build resiliency
sharing of information and knowledge to create stronger and better prepared communities
Process artifacts:
Business strategy
Concurrent with design development, I created a business plan for our product through research and financial modeling.
To build our go-to-market strategy we focused on two audiences, people in flood prone areas and weather enthusiasts.
The app’s freemium model seeks to make this product as accessible as possible, while those with more complicated households can upgrade to make decision making less cumbersome in times of crisis.
Process artifacts:
